And so it begins...

I have spent the greater portion of my adult life befriending, socializing with and dating highly intelligent males of the geeky persuasion.  Being constantly surrounded by brainiacks, puzzlers, socially awkward and knowledge hungry individuals it is not beyond the realms of possibility that some of their interests and passions have rubbed off on me.  I've become what I affectionately call a pseudo-geek.  I can talk the talk but I most definitely don't walk the walk.  I am capable of understanding, participating and contributing to geek conversations, however I've never really lived that lifestyle, I've always been the interested observer.

I've never considered myself to be a person with many smarts.  I've always put my needs, wants and desires on the back burner and always gave those around me a higher priority.

It would seem I have come to a point in my life where I have a solid network of geeks around me and a special few who have shown me that I am capable of becoming more than what I am now.  I have the ability it's just a matter of finding the motivation and passion for learning and knowledge that I've lacked for so long.

Over the past 2 years I have had a great deal of exposure to Open Source Software.  I was forced to learn how to navigate Debian and MythTV.  I've had to use ssh and putty as well as open source word processors, image processors and chat protocols.

It's been a very full on few years of learning.  It started when I moved in with a Unix Systems Administrator (for future reference he will be affectionately called O.G), I had no computer or laptop of my own at this stage and O.G had a no windows operating systems policy on his machines, so I had a choice of either Open Solaris on the Office PC or Debian on the eeeeeePC. I toyed with Open Solaris but it's not very multi-user friendly at the moment, so my ownly logical choice was the Debian eeeeeePC.

I was downloading movies and music (shhhh no tut tut tutting allowed) and I needed to learn how to store, move and rename files.  Thus my first practical lessons in CLI began.  O.G showed me the basics of how to organise files and introduced me to the man pages and I was set.  I spent hours and hours learning the different ways you could rename single files, multiple files, create folders and so forth, never has O.G's data has never been so clean and uniformly named!

I no longer live with O.G but my lessons are continuing.  This post has been entirely written using vi.  This was in last weeks lesson and it's the first time I've created and saved a file like this using vi.  I never cease to be overwhelmed by the power, logic and easiness that is using Linux and CLIs.

I was born a dos girl, grew up a windows girl and as a result feared everything to do with Linux and it's strangeness.  I am now happily an FOSS girl and advocate.  I am unable to use it fulltime in my business due to some windows based only software that is the core of my business, but I'm intending to experiment with WINE and see if I can permanently transfer to Linux (bearing in mind I'll always have a windows partition for gaming purposes).